Steve Jobs called the unibody of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro a Tour de Force. This part is milled from a solid piece of aluminium. I don’t know, it’s not like they have reinvented the wheel or so. But the new notebooks do look very lush. Me want.

Here are some bonus hardware pron pictures of the manufacturing process. You can watch the video for yourself here.

Lee Byron ported one of my favorite java applets called Yellowtail to the iPhone. Yellowtail was developed by Golan Levin back in 2000 as a java applet, a few years later he ported the code to Processing.
Lee got himself an iPhone last week and a few days later he got his Developer’s Certificate. He managed to code this nice version of Yellowtail for the iPhone in just 2 days. You can read some details here.

This Keyboad-Napkin is just one of the 8 products that Valentin Engler, Marius Morger & Daniel Grolimund designed for their ‘Single men’s choice‘ bachelor degree project in Industrial Design. You should definitely check out their website, they even documented all their 68 ideas.

Augmented Reality is nothing new, but till now it was mostly a nerdy webcam demo thing. But when you use a mobile phone like the iPhone, where you can move the camera and the display in one device, the user experience could really become enjoyable. Just think of all the possible applications with this technology. ARToolworks developed a version of the free ARToolKit (a software library for building Augmented Reality applications) for the iPhone. In this video they show us a preview, unfortunatly they only managed to get 10 frames per second. But maybe with some help from Apple they could boost the speed over 20 fps.

So despite my initial enthusiasm, I didn’t buy an iPhone 3G today. It wasn’t an easy dicision but the T-Mobile iPhone 3G plans just don’t fit my needs. I don’t want any included minutes or T-Mobile hotspots access. I want a fair minute rate (not 0,29€ a minute) and more data transfer at full speed (not throttled after just 300 MB). So I guess I’ll plan my next holiday to one of the countries with prepaid iPhones.
If you want to see more iPhone 3G hardware pron, iFixit has the images to get you off.

It’s again that time of the year … I have to go in zen mode. I have to go and see the North Sea … the beach … sand. So it will be quiet here over the next few days.
Speaking of sand, see what Jean-Pierre Hebért does with a mac and sand. ‘Mac-Controlled Algorithmic Art’ it’s called. The steel ball is moved by mac, I guess with a magnet. Just watch the videos in his profile on apple.com. Let’s see if I’m zen enough to do something like that without a mac.